Google Quits Search, Focuses on Waste Management

FAST, Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, and LookSmart To Merge, Combat Google The name of the new company to be determined, but the acronym FAIL has been ruled out.

Animal Rights Activates Protest Google PigeonRankhttp://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html Undercover video discovers that "free range" pigeons used to calculate search results actually must punch in to a time clock and work eight hours per day or lose vesting options for when Google goes public.

AltaVista Wins Patent Suit; Other Search Engines To Close After a seven year legal battle, the US Supreme Court ruled today that AltaVista's patents on searching are indeed valid and that all other crawlers are infringing on its rights. Google's stock plunged 90 percent as the company announced it would have to pull out of the search market, in the wake of its loss.

Overture Rejects Paid Placement Model We've earned enough, company says. Now sites will be ranked by their "feel good" factor. Viagra and casino web sites are considering a class action suit against the former paid listing service, claiming that the model shift endangers their businesses.

Google To Become Portal GoogleMail is to allow anyone to be myname@google.com. New GoogleStocks and GooglePages web building feature also unveiled. "Yeah, we said we'd never become a portal, but that was all part of our master plan," said cofounder Larry Page. Google's other cofounder Sergey Brin also confirmed that the company was launching a hostile takeover of Yahoo.

Yahoo Declares Free Submission Day Anyone signing up for today's "Fools" special is guaranteed to be listed -- for life!

And that sums up today's theme -- happy April Fools Day, everyone! :-)

About the author

Chris Sherman is a frequent contributor to several information industry journals. He's written several books, including The McGraw-Hill CD ROM Handbook and The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See, co-authored with Gary Price. Chris has written about search and search engines since 1994, when he developed online searching tutorials for several clients. From 1998 to 2001, he was About.com's Web Search Guide.